Anthropic Acquires Vercept to Enhance Claude's Computer Use

Anthropic has acquired Vercept to accelerate the development of "computer use" capabilities for Claude, enabling the AI to interact with live applications and perform multi-step tasks as a human would at a keyboard. This acquisition integrates Vercept's expertise in solving perception and interaction problems to solve complex workflows that cannot be solved by code alone.

Technical Focus: AI Perception and Interaction

Anthropic identifies the core challenge of computer use as solving "hard perception and interaction problems." Vercept, led by co-founders Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick, specialized in how AI systems can see and act within the software humans use daily. By bringing this expertise in-house, Anthropic aims to push the frontiers of how Claude can navigate software interfaces and execute complex tasks across multiple tools.

Progress in Computer Use Benchmarks

The acquisition follows the launch of Claude Sonnet 4.6, which demonstrates significant progress in AI computer use. On the OSWorld evaluation benchmark, Sonnet models have improved from under 15% performance in late 2024 to 72.5% with the current version.

Sonnet 4.6 is currently approaching human-level performance in specific tasks, such as:

• Navigating complex spreadsheets
• Completing web forms across multiple browser tabs

Strategic Integration and Team Expansion

Vercept will wind down its external product in the coming weeks to focus entirely on Anthropic's goals. This move follows a recent acquisition of Bun, and reflects Anthropic's strategy of acquiring teams with technical ambitions and a commitment to safety and rigor in AI development.